776 Les Miserables
them about a quarter of an hour to reach the spot where
Jean Valjean stood. It was a frightful moment. A few min-
utes only separated Jean Valjean from that terrible precipice
which yawned before him for the third time. And the galleys
now meant not only the galleys, but Cosette lost to him for-
ever; that is to say, a life resembling the interior of a tomb.
There was but one thing which was possible.
Jean Valjean had this peculiarity, that he carried, as one
might say, two beggar’s pouches: in one he kept his saintly
thoughts; in the other the redoubtable talents of a convict.
He rummaged in the one or the other, according to circum-
stances.
Among his other resources, thanks to his numerous
escapes from the prison at Toulon, he was, as it will be re-
membered, a past master in the incredible art of crawling up
without ladder or climbing-irons, by sheer muscular force,
by leaning on the nape of his neck, his shoulders, his hips,
and his knees, by helping himself on the rare projections of
the stone, in the right angle of a wall, as high as the sixth
story, if need be; an art which has rendered so celebrated
and so alarming that corner of the wall of the Conciergerie
of Paris by which Battemolle, condemned to death, made
his escape twenty years ago.
Jean Valjean measured with his eyes the wall above which
he espied the linden; it was about eighteen feet in height.
The angle which it formed with the gable of the large build-
ing was filled, at its lower extremity, by a mass of masonry
of a triangular shape, probably intended to preserve that too
convenient corner from the rubbish of those dirty creatures